=Paper=
{{Paper
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|storemode=property
|title=App Store, Marketplace, Play! An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-879/paper5.pdf
|volume=Vol-879
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icsob/HyrynsalmiMJSSK12
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==App Store, Marketplace, Play! An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-879/paper5.pdf
App Store, Marketplace, Play!
An Analysis of Multi-Homing in
Mobile Software Ecosystems
Sami Hyrynsalmi1,2 , Tuomas Mäkilä2,1 , Antero Järvi3 , Arho Suominen3 ,
Marko Seppänen4 , and Timo Knuutila2
1
Turku Centre for Computer Science TUCS, Turku, Finland
2
University of Turku, Business and Innovation Development BID, Turku, Finland
{sthyry,tuomas.makila,knuutila}@utu.fi
3
University of Turku, Department of Information Technology, Turku, Finland
{arho.suominen,antero.jarvi}@utu.fi
4
Tampere University of Technology, Department of Industrial Management,
Tampere, Finland
marko.seppanen@tut.fi
Abstract. Multi-homing, a strategy where a developer is publishing
products for multiple platforms, is studied in this paper using descrip-
tive analysis. The data of over 850,000 applications and their developers
were collected from Apple App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft’s Win-
dows Phone Marketplace. The developers publishing for several software
ecosystems were then identified. The findings show that multi-homing is
utilized by only a small set of developers. In addition, the applications
available at several platforms do not seem to differ by the type or the
popularity from single-homing applications.
Key words: application marketplace, multi-homing, software ecosys-
tem
1 Introduction
During the last few years, software ecosystems have been emerging as a signifi-
cant part of the mobile domain. The marketplaces of these software ecosystems
— e.g. Apple App Store, Blackberry App World, Google Play (formerly An-
droid Market), Nokia Ovi, and Windows Phone Marketplace — offer currently
hundreds of thousands of applications from tens of thousands of developers and
the ecosystems are in a tight competition. Not surprisingly, the size of the mar-
ketplace and the application offering have been used as an argument for the
superiority in the struggle of mobile ecosystems. For example, Apple used the
phrase “There’s an App for That” in advertisements of its products in 20091 .
1
Brian X. Chen. Apple Registers Trademark for Theres an App for That. Wired. Oc-
tober 11, 2010. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/app-for-that/ Last
accessed on April 3, 2012.
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 59
S. Hyrynsalmi et al.
Application stores are working as two-sided markets, where the ecosystem’s
orchestrator is enticing both the content vendors and users to commit to the
mobile ecosystem for achieving a positive feedback loop [1]. In this context, the
orchestrator is the economic platform provider i.e. the keystone player of the
two-sided market. From the software developer’s perspective, the choice of a
ecosystem might be crucial. Some developers have chosen to target to two or
more ecosystems, balancing between a greater potential market share and the
costs of porting the product for different platforms [2].
In this paper, we present the first results of a study focusing on multi-homing
in the mobile software ecosystems. A multi-homing developer here is understood
as a developer who publishes its products or services for multiple mobile ecosys-
tems. This kind of publishing strategy is not new and it is known to be utilized
in the mobile domain. However, very little is known for multi-homing, and its
effects on applications, developers and ecosystems. Although Idu, van de Zande,
and Jansen [3] recently studied multi-homing in Apple’s ecosystem, their result,
due to restricting the analysis on Apple ecosystem, can not be generalized as
such. Furthermore, to the authors’ knowledge, the effects on to the ecosystems,
or the scale of multi-homing in mobile software ecosystems has not been esti-
mated before.
Thus, the main research objective of the on-going research is:
How does the multi-homing affect the mobile software ecosystems?
The mobile ecosystems are a high competition area and the application offering
can be used as a tool to distinguish from the competitors. However, if multi-
homing is a common strategy for developers, the differentiating is hard. To un-
derstand the popularity of the phenomenon, we use quantitative analysis to
study the three major application stores. Especially, in this paper we address
the following questions:
– How many application developers currently use the multi-homing strategy?
– What type of applications are published for multiple platforms?
– Are multi-homing applications more popular (in the number of downloads and
the number of users’ ratings) than applications without multi-homing?
We assume that multi-homing strategy might increase the popularity of an ap-
plication. The effect might be bi-directional, since either an application is multi-
homed and therefore gaining more downloads or, due to popularity in a single
platform, it is ported to other platforms. Whatever the reasons may be, it is
expected that it would be an efficient strategy for a developer to publish the
product in multiple marketplaces. This argument is based on the low cost of
porting applications from platform to another [4].
In order to assess our research question, we collected data from three domi-
nant mobile application marketplaces: Android operating system’s marketplace
Google Play; iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch’s Apple App Store; and Windows
Phone Marketplace. As a total, we parsed the data of more than 850,000 appli-
cations. The gathered data was then analyzed for identifying the developers who
publish in more than one platform. Furthermore, we identified the multi-homing
applications and, from these we investigated the types of these applications.
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 60
An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems
The findings show that a relatively small set of developers utilizes multi-
homing publishing strategy for a small set of applications. Moreover, the appli-
cation types and popularity are similar to the single-homers. As well, the results
serve as a starting point for future research on the topic.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents briefly the related
literature of software ecosystems and multi-homing studies. The research method
used is described in Section 3 and the results are reported in Section 4. Section 5
contains the discussion and the last section concludes the study with suggestions
for future work.
2 Background
Although software ecosystems existed already in the ‘90s [5], to the authors’
knowledge, the term was first used by Messerschmitt and Szyperski [6]. The new
concept was then defined by several scholars and practitioners, e.g., [6, 7, 8].
Jansen, Finkelsten, and Brinkkemper [9] see it as “a set of businesses function-
ing as a unit and interacting with a shared market for software and services,
together with the relationships among them. These relationships are frequently
underpinned by a common technological platform or market and operate through
the exchange of information, resources and artifacts.” This definition emphasizes
the interactions and common interests of the ecosystem’s actors.
In addition to the software ecosystems, the concept of ‘mobile ecosystem’
has been recently discussed [10, 11, 12]. The mobile ecosystem is a larger net-
work containing e.g., as argued by Basole [10], mobile network operators, ca-
ble providers and even silicon vendors. In the case of Android ecosystem, Ap-
ple mobile ecosystem and Windows Phone ecosystem, it seems that a software
ecosystem partially overlaps with the mobile ecosystem. For example, the silicon
vendors are not players in the software ecosystem; although, they are crucial
in the mobile ecosystem. In this study, the application platforms are assessed,
however, from the software ecosystem point of view, as we focus our discussion
specifically on mobile software applications and not on the overall interactions
within the mobile device domain.
The application stores in the studied ecosystems are following the theory of
two-sided markets. The concept is defined as an economic platform where ben-
eficial cross-group network effects exist [13]. Described in detail through several
examples by Rochet & Tirole [2] and Parker & Van Alstyne [14], markets with
network effects are often characterized by the presence of two sides whose ul-
timate benefit comes from the interaction through a common platform. Due to
the different needs of the two sides of the platform, the pricing in a two-sided
market is challenging and requires a distinct business model [14]. In the case
of mobile platforms, the users and content providers are the two sides of the
market. It should noted, in the context of this study, the mobile platform is not
the mobile device but the mobile application marketplace.
Two-sided markets can be extended by the concept of ‘multi-homing’ [15].
Multi-homing describes a situation where several competing two-sided economic
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 61
S. Hyrynsalmi et al.
platforms exist in the same market and the two sides of the market are free to
exist in several platforms. As an example, a software developer is utilizing multi-
homing publishing strategy when offering products in both Windows Phone and
Android ecosystem. Similarly, a user is multi-homing when he adopts mobile
devices from several platforms.
Multi-homing in two-sided software ecosystem’s markets has been studied
before. Burkard et al. [16] researched the phenomena in five SaaS marketplaces.
They found only 70 multi-homers from the dataset of over two thousand vendors.
Idu, van de Zande and Jansen [3] investigated multi-homing in Apple ecosystem
with the top 1,800 applications of three sub-ecosystems — iPhone, iPad, and
Mac — and studied whether the developers offer the same product for all or
only a few of these. From their result, 182 out of 1,060 developers (17.2 %)
published at least for two stores. Only 22 publishers from the studied set have
applications in all three stores. As the iPhone and iPad platforms are remarkably
similar from the developers point of view (e.g. the same APIs and SDK), the
share of multi-homing developers is surprisingly low.
3 Research Methods
We chose a quantitative research method to study the phenomenon of multi-
homing in mobile software ecosystems. First, we collected data from all market-
places. This data was used to identify multi-homing applications and develop-
ers. Second, we analyze the types and popularity of multi-homing applications.
Based on this analysis, we further discuss how the publishing strategy affects
the ecosystems.
In order to collect the necessary data, we implemented a set of small scripts
(with Java programming language) that gathered the application data in two
phases. In the first phase, the scripts collect the unique identifiers of the appli-
cations. In the Apple ecosystem, the identifiers were available directly from the
marketplace. From Apple’s store, we included all mobile applications found. The
script went through all categories listing and stored the applications identifiers
into text files. In the end of this first phase, duplicates were removed from the
list.
In two other cases, third parties’ listing services had to be utilized in the
first phase due to the lack of easily readable lists in the stores. For Google Play,
we used AndroidPIT2 and for Windows Phone Marketplace, we used Windows
Phone AppList3 . Furthermore, we collected directly from Google Play the most
downloaded applications of each categories to ensure that the most popular
applications are included into the data. These lists were then combined and the
duplicates removed. We consider it noteworthy that the list of Google Play’s
most downloaded applications did not add new identifiers into the dataset. For
2
AndroidPIT — http://www.androidpit.com
3
Windows Phone Applist — http://www.windowsphoneapplist.com/
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 62
An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems
the Windows Phone ecosystem, we used only the third party’s listing when
collecting the unique identifiers.
In the second phase, for each identified applications the scripts collected
various attributes from the applications’ public web pages at the marketplaces.
The gathered attributes varied depending on the stores, but for all marketplaces,
at least the name, price and the developer of each application was collected.
When possible, the US versions of the stores were used. If an application was
not available at a US store, other the stores of other countries were investigated
too; however, the scripts were run in a server located in Finland, and thus some
applications may have been filtered out by the marketplace due to the IP address
used. If an application was not available, the script wrote a note to the text file
and the application was assumed to have been removed from the marketplace.
The information was gathered in the end of March (Google Play and Apple
App Store) and in the beginning of April (Windows Phone Marketplace), 2012.
The data was stored separately for each marketplace to a CSV file. In the analy-
sis, we used IBM SPSS Statistics Version 20 and Microsoft Excel 2010. In order to
identify which developers publish on several ecosystems we implemented a script
(with Python programming language) that compared the developer or publisher
fields from different marketplaces trying to match them against each other. The
algorithm utilized exact and approximate matching. In exact matching ‘Rovio’
(used by the publisher of ‘Angry Birds’ in Windows Phone Marketplace) and
‘Rovio Mobile Ltd.’ (used in Google Play and Apple App Store) are considered
as two distinct cases. In approximate matching a certain amount of difference in
the names is allowed. The reason for using two matching rules is that the exact
matching forms the lower bound whereas the approximate matching is closer to
the actual number of the popularity of the multi-homing applications.
The evaluation of the multi-homing application types was done by analyzing
their categories in the marketplaces. All studied marketplaces offer a categoriza-
tion for the applications, however, each one uses their own set of categories. For
this study, we formed a general categorization and mapped the marketplaces’
categories to the general one. The general categorization tries to capture the
type of the applications, not the exact content or the target group. For example,
a majority of top ‘Sports’ applications offers news and information of a certain
sport, league, or club — the same basic functionality is found also in ‘News’ and
‘Weather’ applications. It should be also noted that Android is the only plat-
form with the specific ‘Personalization’ category due to its highly configurable
interface. The general categorization and the mapping are shown in Table 1.
4 Results
4.1 Descriptive Statistics of the Ecosystems
In total, we gathered information of 857,411 applications from the three applica-
tion stores. The descriptive statistics — number of applications and developers,
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 63
S. Hyrynsalmi et al.
Table 1. Mapping of application categories of different marketplaces. The number of
subcategories are presented in parentheses following the main category. The percentages
of each general category are presented in Table 3.
General Apple Google Windows Phone
Categories App Store Play Marketplace
Games Games (19) Games (8) Games (14)
Health Health & Fitness, Health & Fitness, health + fitness (3)
Medical Medical
Books Books, Catalogs, Books & Reference, books + reference (4)
Reference Comics,
Libraries & Demo
Music Music Media & Video, music + video
Music & Audio
News News, Newsstand, News & Magazines, news + weather (2),
Weather, Sports Sports, government + politics (4),
Weather sports
Business Business, Business, Tools, tools + productivity,
Productivity Productivity business
Utilities
Travel Travel, Transportation, travel + navigation (8)
Navigation Travel & Local
Social Social Networking Social, social
Communication
Finance Finance Finance personal finance
Education Education Education education, kids + family
Entertainment Entertainment Entertainment entertainment
Lifestyle Lifestyle Lifestyle, Shopping lifestyle (7)
Photography Photo & Video Photography photo
Personalization Live Wallpaper
Personalization
Widgets
percentage of applications that are available for download for free, and percent-
age of developers with only one application — of the ecosystems are presented
in Table 2. Apple’s ecosystem is the oldest and clearly the largest one. Windows
Phone Marketplace is rather young and small with less than 100,000 applications
offered by only a few thousand developers.
Table 2. Descriptive numbers of each application store
#apps % free #developers Only 1 app
Apple App Store 428,384 46.6 % 117,817 54.5 %
Google Play 363,861 67.2 % 91,514 57.5 %
Windows Phone Marketplace 65,166 66.9 % 18,426 50.7 %
Windows Phone Marketplace (normalized) 72,748 70.4 %
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 64
An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems
It should be noted that Windows Phone Marketplace contains built-in sup-
port for so called Free to try -model where a user can install and use the product
for free, but the premium content is a subject to charge. In App Store and Google
Play, this feature is not directly supported and thus the developers often offer
both a free and a paid version of the same product (see e.g. [17]). This feature de-
creases the total number of applications offered in Windows Phone Marketplace,
and it also affects to the ratio of free and paid applications.
We normalize the Windows Phone Marketplace application count by calcu-
lating ‘Free to try’ applications in the marketplace twice (i.e. once as a free and
once as a paid one). With this, the total number of applications in Windows
Phone Marketplace increases to 72,748. Despite the differences in the measure-
ment methods, it is clear that Windows Phone Marketplace is, at the moment
of data gathering, far behind its competitors in terms of number of applications.
However, the marketplace is rapidly growing [18].
The applications distribution into the general categories (see Table 1) is pre-
sented in Table 3. The similarities are noteworthy and the small differences may
be due to the differences in the marketplaces’ original categorizations. For exam-
ple, Windows Phone Marketplace has the smallest share of the ‘Music’ category,
however, it is clearly leading in the ‘Entertainment’ category.
Table 3. A comparision of the categories
Apple Google Windows Phone
App Store Play Marketplace
Games 18 % 13 % 14 %
Health 4% 3% 3%
Books 11 % 9% 10 %
Music 5% 6% 2%
News 6% 7% 11 %
Business 14 % 14 % 18 %
Travel 8% 6% 6%
Social 2% 5% 3%
Finance 2% 2% 2%
Education 10 % 5% 6%
Entertainment 10 % 11 % 19 %
Lifestyle 8% 8% 5%
Photography 2% 1% 2%
Personalization - 10 % -
4.2 Multi-Homing
We approach multi-homing by identifying both developers and applications
present in at least two ecosystems. In developer matching, we utilize exact match-
ing, i.e. the names have to be exactly similar, including additional words such
as ‘GmbH’ or ‘Inc’.
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 65
S. Hyrynsalmi et al.
When identifying multi-homing applications, we are pairing the applications
from the different platforms and calculating the unique applications. In appli-
cation matching, we use two matching strategies for both applications and de-
velopers: exact and approximate matching. Exact matching requires that the
application names and the publisher names are the same (case-insensitive). Ap-
proximate matching requires that the application names are exactly the same,
however, a certain amount of difference is allowed in the publisher names. In
the approximate matching we used Python’s sequence similarity function4 in
the similarity metric. The exact matching gives the lower bound of the multi-
homers, and the actual value is estimated with approximate matching.
We tested the approximate matching with several sequence similarity thresh-
olds. The correctness of approximate matching was evaluated only by visual ex-
amination; however, we clearly found pairs with small differences in the names
such as the lack of postfixes like ‘Inc’. Based on this analysis, we found the
threshold of 50 % was the lowest value with no significant false positives.
With exact matching of developers, we found 14,451 (6.8 % of all unique)
developers publishing in at least two marketplaces. Figure 1 presents a Venn
diagram of application developers in the three studied ecosystems. Most of the
multi-homing developers (12,338) publish for Apple App Store and Google Play.
Approximately as many multi-homers publish only for Android and Windows
Phone 7 (796, 0.37 %), and only for iOS and Windows Phone 7 (725, 0.30 %).
Only 592 (0.28 %) developers publish for all three ecosystems.
Fig. 1. An approximate Venn diagram of identified multi-homing developers of Google
Play, Apple App Store and Windows Phone Marketplace
4
Python v2.7.3. documentation — http://docs.python.org/library/difflib.
html
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 66
An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems
The results of the application matchings are presented in Table 4. With the
exact matching, we found 15,205 (1.83 %) multi-homers out of the 828,763 unique
applications. Only 268 (0.032 %) applications were found in all three ecosystems.
Although the number of found matches increased when the similarity require-
ment was loosened in the approximate matching, the growth was relatively small
and the overall ratio of multi-homers out of all applications remained low. Even
at the most relaxed case of approximate matching, without clear false positives,
the multi-homing applications present only a mere 3.2 % of all unique applica-
tions. As a consequence, multi-homing publishing strategy is used only by a few
developers and typically for a small set of applications.
Table 4. Results of application matching with exact and approximative algorithms.
The approximative matching was used with several different requirements for the name
similarity.
Unique Apple + Android + Android + All Multi-
applications Windows Windows Apple stores homers
Exact 828,763 485 1,438 13,014 268 15,205
Approximate (95%) 827,949 559 1,459 14,443 299 16,760
Approximate (85%) 825,031 592 1,541 16,665 341 19,139
Approximate (50%) 813,005 781 2,431 22,036 668 25,916
When comparing the results of the developer and application matching, it was
noted that several multi-homing developers had no multi-homing applications. A
small set of these were examined by hand. Some developers offer clearly different
applications for different marketplaces and some developers had published the
same application with a different name. In few cases, it was not clear whether the
developer was the same or just the name, e.g. two John Smiths, one publishing
in Apple App Store and another in the Google Play.
The distribution of multi-homing applications into the categories is rather
similar than that of all applications (Table 5). We assume that the differences
less than 2 percentage points can can be explained with statistical error. Thus
the only significant differences were in ‘News’, ‘Entertainment’, and ‘Lifestyle’
categories. It was surprising that multi-homing is not popular in any single
category, e.g. we were assuming that the ‘News’ applications are easily multi-
homed.
The popularity of multi-homing applications is assessed in figures 2 and 3.
Figure 2 depicts the distribution of the installation proportions of multi-homed
applications in Google Play. Because Apple App Store and Windows Phone
Marketplace do not reveal the installation numbers, the popularity of the multi-
homed applications is illustrated through the distribution of user ratings in Fig-
ure 3. From the figures, it can be seen that the application popularity proportions
are similar for all and multi-homing applications.
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 67
S. Hyrynsalmi et al.
Table 5. The distribution of multi-homing applications’ categories and in comparison
to the average of all applications
Multi-homing apps All apps
Games 14 % 16 %
Health 5% 3%
Books 8 % 10 %
Music 4% 5%
News 11 % 7 %
Business 14 % 15 %
Travel 9% 7%
Social 4% 3%
Finance 4% 2%
Education 7% 7%
Entertainment 8 % 11 %
Lifestyle 11 % 8 %
Photography 1% 2%
Fig. 2. The distribution of the installation category proportions of multi-homing ap-
plications and all application in Google Play
5 Discussion
Although the overall number of applications available at the mature market-
places is large, the number of multi-homing developers is fairly small. This was
expected as the ecosystems seem to contain lots of developers who are publish-
ing just for fun or are lacking a clear monetization plan [19]. The multi-homing
developers are expected to be professional ones, and therefore, their presence
should be crucial for the ecosystem and its orchestrator.
Based on the gathered data, it seems that a tiny fraction of applications
forms the majority of the content used by the consumers in the marketplaces.
These applications are usually published by professional developers and they are
often offered for several operating systems. These developers are becoming more
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 68
An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems
Fig. 3. The distribution of the proportions of users’ rating numbers for multi-homing
applications and all application in three studied marketplaces
and more critical to the whole ecosystem. Recently, when it was reported that
the sequel of a popular mobile game might skip the Windows Phone 7, market
analysts suggested that this might hamper the orchestrator’s effort to attract
gamers5 . Therefore, the lack of popular developers and applications, such as
‘Facebook’ or ‘Angry Birds’, might be a major handicap.
The application ecosystems are primarily tools for ecosystem orchestrators
to leverage their main businesses. The intentions are not openly discussed by the
orchestrators; however, understanding them is beneficial in assessing the ecosys-
tems. The main objectives seem to be different in all three studied ecosystems:
App Store seems to aim at increasing Apple’s mobile device sales that have
particularly high margins. Google Play seems to extend Google’s on-line adver-
tising business into mobile devices. Windows Phone Marketplace and ecosystem
more broadly seem to aim at protecting Microsofts software sales in the ongoing
mobile-desktop convergence. Generating revenues directly from application sales
seem to be, at least for now, a secondary objective. The primary objectives of
all three ecosystem orchestrators seem to be to maximize the number of users in
their mobile ecosystems. The application stores can contribute by maximizing
both the number and quality of available applications, thus making the users
value proposition more lucrative. The key to this is boosting the developers’ and
content providers’ interest on the application store.
In the interviews of commercial application developers, the financial aspects
were highlighted as one of the major reasons to select an ecosystem [20]. Clearly,
the ecosystem orchestrators try to ensure good business opportunities for de-
5
Jon Erlichman & Diana ben-Aaron. Rovio Executive Says Angry Birds Space Skips
Windows Phone. Bloomberg. March 23, 2012. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/
2012-03-22/-angry-birds-space-edition-skips-windows-phone-in-blow-to-
nokia.html Last accessed on May 30th, 2012
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 69
S. Hyrynsalmi et al.
velopers and content providers as well as lower the barriers for developing for
and publishing in an application store. Thus, these core business forces should
favor multi-homing as a strategy for developers, which in turn would diminish
the application ecosystems differentiating value proposition for users. In this sit-
uation the orchestrators have to carefully balance between these two conflicting
outcomes: maximizing developer attractiveness ultimately leads to multi-homing
and smaller user attractiveness compared to competing ecosystems. This would
weaken the orchestrators’ position in the ecosystems and strengthen the po-
sitions of developers and other players, like platform independent publishers,
syndicators etc.
Control and governance practices are the tool to manage this balance. In
practice, the orchestrator can help the developers with various monetization op-
portunities, distribution means with broader or more focused target segments
and application discovery mechanisms, other sales funnel management and ana-
lytics services. On the other hand, with content selection and orchestrators own
and partner’s service offerings, the application ecosystem can differentiated for
certain user markets.
We believe that data on multi-homing can be used as an indicator on how
different ecosystems are evolving with respect to the conflict of loosing strength
while trying to gain it. For instance, a situation where all popular applications
are available in all ecosystems, is a clear sign of reduced significance of the
application markets as differentiators, whereas strong differences in the distri-
bution of application categories would indicate that the application ecosystems
are profiled differently. To our surprise, we found no evidence of increased multi-
homing with application popularity and no significant differences in application
categories. We were expecting that the multi-homing applications are popular
in all marketplaces, and that the majority of multi-homed applications act as
front-ends for other services. However, the results suggest that the application
stores, as for now, are strongly differentiated with respect to developers’ value
proposition or that the cost to developers for multi-homing is prohibitive in
many cases.
In order to really gain insight on how the ecosystems are controlled and
governed and what are the developers’ and content providers’ varying business
objectives in the ecosystems, more sophisticated indicators are needed. As an ex-
ample, data on where applications are first published and how soon they migrate
to other ecosystems gives insight on which ecosystem provides the most innova-
tive new applications for users, which is certainly one possible way to enhance
the user attractiveness of an ecosystem. Reflecting this level of insight on ap-
plication ecosystems back to the ways how different orchestrators leverage their
main businesses could give us understanding on the health and success of the
application ecosystems, as well as trending data as the indicators are analyzed
over time. These topics will be considered in our future research.
The first results of our work-in-progress research on the application platform
multi-homing are presented in this paper. There are some factors that might
affect the generalization of these results. For example, the third parties’ listing
Proceedings of IWSECO 2012 70
An Analysis of Multi-Homing in Mobile Software Ecosystems
services were utilized when collecting the application identifiers for Google Play
and Windows Phone Marketplace. Therefore, it is likely that the gathered set
does not contain every single product of the marketplace. However, in these cases,
the number of missing applications should be rather small. It should also be noted
that the collected data only presents the situation of one day. For example,
during a period of one month, Google Play lost over 7,000 applications while
almost 19,000 new application were published [19]. Furthermore, the important
applications, the most downloaded ones, are most likely included in the dataset.
Recently, Apple’s press release6 stated that the marketplace has more than
550,000 applications. Our dataset of over 428,000 applications is not necessarily
complete and it is most likely missing applications that are not offered for our
geographic area. We also have no knowledge on how the number of 550,000 has
been computed. However, we believe that the most important applications are
included. Finally, since the marketplaces are growing rapidly, we believe that the
exact numbers should not be as interesting as the trends and the overall picture.
6 Conclusion
In this paper we presented the first results of our on-going research on multi-
homing in application platforms. We studied three dominant application plat-
forms by collecting the data of over 850,000 applications. The results show that
the multi-homing publishing strategy is utilized only by a small set of devel-
opers (6.8 %), and that there is no significant difference in the multi-homing
vs. all applications’ popularity and type. Based on our finding, we discussed
the potential effects of multi-homing for the ecosystems. Further work includes
a qualitative study of multi-homing developers and applications to explore the
difference to single-homers. A survey study could also explain better the mo-
tivations and strategies of the companies working in the multiple ecosystems.
Furthermore, this paper presented a general view on the ecosystem; an analysis
from the user’s, the orchestrator’s and the developer’s point of views are another
important topic for further research.
Acknowledgments
Authors thank Mr. Peter Virta, Dr. Tero Jokela, and Mr. Jesse Alho for excellent
technical advices. In addition, Hyrynsalmi is grateful for the grant of Nokia
Foundation.
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